We’ve all had them: creepy experiences. The kind that make you wonder whether you didn’t imagine the whole thing. Whether imagined or otherwise, these stories will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
This piece is based on a Quora Question. Link on the last page.
1/6. A week after my husband died I received a call from him. My cell phone rang as I was chatting with a friend and I took it from my pocket, looked at the screen and dropped it in shock. It said “Bob Cell” with his number.
I almost couldn’t breathe. My friend picked it up, gasped and asked if someone had his phone and I said “no, it’s at home turned off”. I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. I kept thinking as I drove frantically home “I’m imagining this. This is not real. I’m really not thinking clearly.”
I was shaking so bad I could barely put my key in the front door of my house and I nearly tripped as I ran into my house. His phone was on the kitchen counter exactly where I left it and it was turned off. When I checked the outgoing calls there wasn’t one to my phone.
I still get a strange feeling when I think of that experience. While I realize there are things that cannot be explained in life, I tend to lean toward fact based answers.
AT &T couldn’t explain it. I did talk to a psychologist who worked with terminal patients and their families. I asked if she had ever been told of incidents like these and she said yes. It’s more common than you think and it’s not wishful thinking on the part of the living.
Although I never answered that call because I dropped my phone, I wonder to this day what would have happened if I had answered.
Ava Stevens
2/6. I met a woman on a dating site about 10 years ago and we went out for lunch in Providence on Federal Hill. She was very quiet and I was sure she didn’t care much for me. It was quite a bit of work to get her to speak about anything and by the end of the evening I figured it was curtains on any chance of a relationship.
But after lunch she told me she was frightened of Providence and asked me to walk her to her car. I agreed. When we got to her car, she shook my hand and thanked me, and as an afterthought, asked me if I wanted a ride back to my car — she felt she could trust me now. I said okay.
As soon as she got me in the car, she completely changed. (continued…)
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She was all over me. She wanted to make out hot and heavy. I didn’t even get a chance to put on the seat belt. I was incredibly (and pleasantly) surprised. We made plans for another date. We went to the movies. Again, she was very quiet and standoffish until we got to her car – then she was all over me.
The next day I came home from work and when I opened my mailbox I found a small package. Inside were two wedding rings with a note reading: “We are destined to be One.” There was no postage. Whoever put it there, put it there in person. I suspected it was her and I was uneasy. I called her up.
She asked me if I got her package. I said yes. She said, “I went to my psychic. She said you were my soulmate.” I realized then that she had issues. I said, “Uhm, I don’t think so.” And after a discussion of how inappropriate she was being, I hung up the phone.
The next day when I came home from work she was parked in my driveway. I got out of the car, furious. “Who do you think you are, coming to my house uninvited?” I told her to leave and never return.
For the next year I got calls, emails and love letters every single day. She once called ten times in one day. At first, I tried to tell her she was wasting her time. But it did no good. To her, we were destined to be together.
It has been ten years since this happened. I still get emails from her about once a month. I still get phone calls from her about twice a year. She has never changed her number, so I know now to never answer the phone when I see it.
If accidentally I do answer, she takes it as an acknowledgement that I have feelings for her and she goes into a burst of mails and emails and small gifts and phone calls.
I never saw her as a threat, as least I have never felt threatened. She is just delusional. It’s very, very creepy. But the creepiest thing about her, in my opinion, is that she is a Harvard-trained medical doctor who treats her own patients.
Jay Bazzotti
3/6. Last year, during my senior year of college I lived with a couple of roommates in a house in the oldest area of the town. Our landlord told us that the house had always been in his family since it was built in the 1860s.
Aside from that, we didn’t really know much about the history of it. It was a creaky and rickety old house, with an especially creepy basement, that featured laundry machines and an unused coal room.
Shortly after moving in, some strange things began to happen there. (continued…)
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The power would randomly go out for a few minutes before switching back on by itself. The oddest thing about these power outages was that they only seemed to happen at night. My roommates and I simply associated the issues with the age of the house.
One evening, while I was doing my laundry, I noticed something odd. The door to the coal room was shut. I went to inspect it and found that it was locked. I called my roommates down and we determined it was locked from the inside. They all laughed it off, but I felt rather unsettled.
About a week later, I was home alone in my room. Suddenly, the TV flickered and the power went out. The house went silent. I turned my phone’s flashlight on and prepared to go into the basement in order to flip the breakers.
As I approached the basement door, I distinctly heard the sound of footsteps coming up creaky stairs. I’ll never forget the sound, menacing and methodical…
CLUNkkk… CLUNkkk… CLUNkkk…
I got the HELL out of there. I ran to my car and raced to my girlfriend’s house for the night.
The next day I told my roommates about what had happened. They didn’t seem to believe me, but agreed to come check out the basement with me. When we made it down the stairs, we made an extremely unsettling discovery…
The coal room door was wide open with the lock broken.
Ryan Stone
4/6. My first semester at university, I stayed in a dormitory. My room was on the first floor. The rooms were not exactly secure, meaning the doors did not have any sort of major deadbolts.
The door that went out onto the shared patio and garden area could easily be unlocked by sliding the glass of the window, rolling back the screen, and then reaching through to turn the knob from the inside. This didn’t really bother me because we were on the campus of a university in a small town.
Everyone who stayed at there knew everyone else, we ate meals together, partied together etc. However, a week or so after I moved into my room, I started to notice strange little things that would be different inside my room. (continued…)
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The changes were small enough that I thought they were just things I hadn’t noticed before, like writing in black marker on the inside of one of my cabinets, or those glowing stars inside the “closet space.” Also, every once in a while I would find these little fake roses stuck into the locks of my doors. Again, I just brushed it off as nothing to worry about.
Until one night. At some point in the night I bolted awake, startled, only to notice that there was a guy I had never seen before leaning over me as I slept, with his hands on either side of my head. I was extremely disoriented at first and simply managed to say “What the f***?”
And this guy stood up, backed slowly away, and started saying “It’s okay, I am supposed to be here, I am supposed to be here.” Then he just turned and walked out my back door leading to the shared patio area and off into the night.
Needless to say, I was freaked out, but it was like 3 am, so I threw on some clothes and ran down to my friend James’ room and ended up sleeping on his floor for the rest of the night.
The next morning I went to the main office and asked that they put deadbolts on my doors and change all the locks.
As I mentioned, I had never seen the guy before, and I never saw him again. Also, all the weird little things that I had brushed off stopped happening. It was definitely creepy to think that this guy might have been breaking into my room all the time at night to watch me sleep. Shudder.
Sharon Miller
5/6. This true story explains why I’ll never again pick up a hitchhiker.
I was 18 years old and like most males of that age, utterly oblivious to danger. I was invincible, so what did it matter if I took the odd risk? It was early Saturday morning and I spotted a hitchhiker on a familiar local road. As was my habit, I pulled over and waved him into the passenger seat.
The door swung open, and three previously unnoticed details registered in rapid succession. It was obvious that this guy was very bad news. (continued…)
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This guy was enormous. The top of my doorframe was only about to his chest and he was easily 300 lbs of muscle.
Also, he was wearing pajamas kind of hospital-looking pajamas and he wasn’t even wearing any shoes or socks while walking on a major road.
Thirdly, as he bent way down to fit in my car he revealed a half-shaved head with a scar that resembled the stitches on a football
It was clear that a significant portion of his skull, and probably of his brain, had been surgically removed because heads don’t bend inward like that. I had never seen anyone so bizarre, even in a movie.
As I was trying to form an exit strategy, he started telling me how the nurses at St John Hospital had failed to keep him from leaving, and he walked right out through the security doors. That hospital was almost a mile from where I picked him up.
My best escape plan was to drop and roll from the moving vehicle, hoping he wouldn’t get one of his massive paws wrapped around my scrawny bicep. Before I could execute it, he told me exactly where he wanted to go and it was only a few minutes up the road. I liked the thought of keeping my car and my life, so I took him there.
To my relief, he exited the car without delay, but as I pulled away he did not go to either door of this nice suburban house: he began walking around from window to window, peering in through the shades.
I never told anyone this story because for years I thought I might have either dreamt it or contributed to a crime.
If you’re the person with the big scar and this was all legit, please tell me you just forgot where you hid the spare key!
-Oliver Hoffman
6/6. When I was about eighteen, I got a telephone call from a strange man. The phone in my room rang. (For you kids reading now, telephones used to actually be attached to walls; you didn’t carry them around with you. I was one of the privileged few kids my age who not only had his own phone, but also his own number – listed in the phone book and everything!)
So I answered it. The man on the other end of the line asked, “Is this Courtney Ballard?” and I acknowledged that it was. He told me his name in a tone that implied that he expected me to know who he was. I was clueless. (continued…)
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He asked me again if I was me, and I had no choice but to again say that yes, I was in fact me. He then said, “I’m calling to make sure you’re OK. You looked pretty shook up yesterday.”
At this point I had to tell him that I had no idea what he was talking about. I had been fine the day before.
He pressed on: “Yesterday? When you wrecked your car?”
“Sir… I… think you might have the wrong number.”
“Yes sir, that’s me, but I didn’t wreck my car yesterday…”
Over the course of a very confusing and uncomfortable fifteen minutes, he proceeded to tell me about ‘our meeting’ the day before: I had come around the corner in front of his house too fast, lost control, and hit a large oak tree in his front yard.
I had been shaken up, but the car was drive-able and I’d refused all offers of help. He’d managed to get me to reveal my name before I left, and I’d told him that I was on my way home to that small town, but nothing else.
He described me – my size, my shape, my hair length and color. He described my car – not the make and model, but the size, shape, and color.
At first I thought it was a put-on, that a friend was pranking me, but as the conversation progressed, the man’s concern was convincing. He gave me his name and told me where he lived over the course of the call, and he invited me to stop by sometime.
When I hung up the phone, I was actually curious; I went outside and looked at my car. No damage – everything was just as I remembered it. I shook my head and walked back inside.
A few days later I was driving home and this phone call was echoing around the back of my mind. I remembered the man’s name, and what part of town he lived in. It wasn’t far off of my route home, so I looked him up in the phone book, got his address, and headed that way. As I came around a sweeping bend in the road I saw a house like the one he had described. In the front yard was a large oak, and there were marks in the grass where a car has recently left the road, leading straight for the tree.
And on the tree, paint that perfectly matched my car.
I was so shaken that I almost ran off the road and into the tree.
Courtney Ballard